


Lontananza

by mcclay



Category: Umineko no Naku Koro ni | When the Seagulls Cry
Genre: AU, Biting, Choking, Femdom, Happy Ending, Other, Trans Character, Trans Yasu, Umineko Spoilers, everything is fine, small amount of Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-26 15:16:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19008412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcclay/pseuds/mcclay
Summary: The horrors of Rokkenjima are over. Battler and Sayo were able to escape together without any car or boat related accidents and returned to civilization. However picking up your life, or making a new one for Sayo, is pretty hard after your whole family was murdered. And Sayo continually retreating behind the Beatrice persona has left some distance in their relationship, distance that Battler wants to bridge.Also bless the glorious Gootarts for helping to edit at least part of this m e s s.





	Lontananza

**Author's Note:**

> Gender and Pronoun Note: Sayo is nonbinary and prefers she/her pronouns in this work. This is simply my take on her character and I find pretty much all trans interpretations of Sayo to be V A L I D, given the complexity of her situation.

It was amazing what ten tons of gold could buy.

Not that Battler was unpleasantly surprised when Sayo had pulled out that ATM card and showed him exactly what Kinzo had been squirreling away underneath the mansion. Ten pounds of gold added up to a lot of yen. Enough to pay off what Rudolf still had on the house. Enough to put himself, Sayo and eventually Ange through school; with a good bit left over the help Aunt Eva’s hospital stay. If money was all that was needed for a happy life, the remaining Ushiromiya’s would’ve been the happiest people in all the world.

It hadn’t quite worked out like that. Homecoming was...hard. Battler would be the first one to admit it. In the beginning he had refused to go to therapy, declaring that as a real man he didn’t need something as stupid as a shrink, though he had talked Sayo into going. Then the weeks had worn on and the nightmares didn’t stop. He had used to love swimming before, now just being up to his waist in water made him unsteady on his feet. The worst was the smell of roses. He hadn’t noticed at the time but Rokkenjima had been absolutely inundated with their smell from the gardens. About a month in and he had a episode picking up Ange from school. The smell of roses had hit him and he had cried in the car for a half hour while his little sister watched in horror. No more not going to therapy after that. All macho refusal had gone away. Putting his own mental health in danger was one thing, doing that to his sister was far beyond what Battler could stomach.

Sayo, however, seemed to take it worse than him. Battler could only imagine what she was dealing with. After they had been picked up on the side of the road, Sayo soaked from her attempt to dive into the sea and Battler still woozy from almost getting hit head on by a car, she had opened up to him about herself in the ambulance. There had been a lot of crying and Battler was glad that the emergency personnel had been up in the front, listening to the radio when it had happened. What Sayo had said was meant for him only, a little cat box that he would guard with his life. Also probably her therapist, but that was different. Still, the name Ushiromiya, which he had already tried to cast off once, felt like a greasy shroud after that. It had been one thing to be related to a philandering failure, quite another thing to be related to Kinzo. His family was, to put it simply, the fucking worst. It was no goddamn good, not at all.

After opening up to him, even as days wore into weeks and weeks into months, Battler could see Sayo start to fade. In the beginning she had stayed herself, struggling with catching upon remedial schooling, talking to the social service workers with a core of self assured righteousness that Battler envied. But slowly, almost without Battler being able to notice, Sayo stopped showing up and Beatrice took her place. More and more often Beato would show up in the bright blonde wig and flowing dress, which Battler had managed to get her to give up for something a bit more reasonable after awhile. And while Battler loved Beatrice like he loved all of Sayo’s parts, slowly she was pulling away from him. At this point the only times he ever saw her were late at night, curled up in a ball on the other bed in their bedroom, reading a book or just thinking about something. There was a sense that, if he didn’t act now, that Sayo Yasuda would disappear from him entirely and this distance would grow and grow until there was nothing left.

So Battler acted.

It was night, after Battler had taken a long bath and Beatrice had finished studying for her tests tomorrow. Battler was laying on his bed, having put down the Christie novel he had been reading long ago to stare at the ceiling, Beato idly checking her phone down near his feet. Even with Beato touch was difficult. Sudden embraces and bumps panicked Sayo easily, and any prolonged contact made her uncomfortable. As Beatrice she could handle it easier, the assumed confidence and over the top personality of the Golden Witch brushing past most of Sayo’s ingrained barriers, but even then Beatrice kept her physical contact with others short. Six months later they had worked up to holding hands in public sometimes, with Beato blushing hard the entire time. The teasing he got out of it was amazing, it was nice to be able to fire back at Beatrice every so often, but it was the simple joy of feeling his partners fingers wrapped around his that made Battler truly smile.

“Baaaaaaaatler-chan! You have a stupid grin on your face. I hope you aren’t thinking of anything dirty, otherwise I’d have to deliver One Thousand Years of Death on your pitiful human body!” Beatrice laughs out that worryingly high pitched ‘ahaha’ that she was so found of. Battler often wondered how much time she had spent practicing it. Hopefully longer than it had taken to set up her murder mystery. 

“What's wrong with a man thinking that way about his girlfriend! You don’t think I’m going to just sit here like a monk and think nothing but pure thoughts! It's your fault for having such good breasts Beato, you’re tempting me with such a sinful view!” He sat up and made grabby hands at her, prompting Beatrice to turn around and mock yell, throwing one of the pillows from her bed at him. Battler can only keep this act up for a little while before he doubled over laughing, with Beatrice quickly following suit.

As the laughter subsides Battler sits up and wipes away a tear from his eye before schooling his face into a much more serious look. “Beato I, I did have something I wanted to talk about.

The tone of his voice catches her strangely and Beatrice looks at him, nervousness suddenly covering her face. “Yes? Everything’s okay, right? Did the university overcharge you for classes again?”

Battler sighs and looks up at the ceiling for a long time before speaking. “Beatrice I love you,” his voice never failed to hitch with a mixture of giddy joy and nervous energy when he said that, “but I feel like I don’t, well, know you very well. Well. I know Beatrice really well but I kinda, ah.” He pauses to catch his breath, he hadn’t noticed that he had started breathing heavy. “I don’t know Sayo well at all. I fell in love with all of you, yes, but I want to know more about the person at the center of all this.”

There is a long silence as Beat- no, Sayo, sits on the bed. Slowly she reaches up and pulls down the wig, letting that short brown hair go free. She is beautiful, thinks Battler, a sort of transcendental beauty that few have. Beato was made up, Sayo’s idea of what his perfect woman would be. Loud, powerful, wide hipped, blonde and perfect. All good qualities, but seeing Sayo as she was always had a deeper pull on him. Her face seemed slender without the makeup and wig, elfin in a way that was hard for him to describe. The pretension of power, the loud and almost insecure way Beatrice carried herself fell away to reveal a unsure but determined young person, standing at the precipice of finding their way. Her intelligence and wit and, even hidden as it was under her deep lack of self worth and the dysphoria, a back bone that carried more power with it than anyone Battler had ever seen. This was the person he had promised to carry away from Rokkenjima so long ago. 

“I…” Sayo rolls her tongue in her mouth for a few seconds before continuing, “I can be Sayo tomorrow, if you’d like. If you didn’t like Beato anymore you should’ve-”

 

“No that's not it at all!” Battler sprang from the bed, clenching his fist in a headstrong pose with his usual passion, “Sayo I love Beatrice, and I love that you feel safe while being her. I just worry that you’re using her too much. I don’t want Sayo to disappear and only Beatrice to remain. Without each other neither of you are complete. I don’t want to lose you Sayo, when I think about you fading away everything gets so dark and awful!” 

Sayo sighs at this outburst, he really was incompetent sometimes, and stands up to join him. “You should’ve opened with that rather than making me worry, I thought..well, its not important what I thought..” The annoyance in her voice was tempered by a strong layer of affection. “You’re probably right. It isn’t healthy for me to be Beatrice all the time. I need to be myself too, even if that's scary.” She takes a deep breath and puts a determined look on her face. “Tomorrow, Ushiromiya Battler, we are going on date. Fuck school I’m gonna stab our professors if they complain. We are going to make breakfast together, go to the park, look at mystery novels in the bookstore, eat out at a fancy restaurant and then, when we come home,” Sayo clenches at the hem of Beato’s dress as she fights off nervous fear and giddy excitement, “We are going to fuck.”

Battler, who had been nodding along to this, imagining a happy day out with his partner, froze for a second before speaking. “What?”


End file.
